South African regional airline Lift is on track to increase its available seat capacity by 305% to roughly 1.5 million seats this year, according to Jonathan Ayache, the co-founder and chief executive of Lift Airline.
This was a huge increase from 370 000 seats, he said.
In a Business Report interview last week, Ayache said: “Lift is adding four aircraft to its fleet, which has been done using flexible capacity that can easily be increased or decreased based on demand.
“We have expanded our route network with the launch of both the Johannesburg-Durban route and, most recently, the Durban-Cape Town route. We’re on track to increase our available seat capacity to roughly1.5 million seats in 2023, a huge increase from 370 000,” Ayache said.
Despite all the challenges facing the airline industry, both locally and globally, Lift had done exceptionally well.
He said customers were responding well to their business offering as it focused on the customer experience and complete flexibility, which allowed passengers to change and cancel without any penalties.
Looking forward to a new year, it became clear that even while a slow ascent to recovery was expected in 2023, putting passengers first would remain a key priority, and flexibility and market agility would be crucial.
Lift had seen a very strong festive season after launching new routes between Johannesburg and Durban, as well as Cape Town and Durban in October. Travel between these three destinations accounted for 75% of all domestic passenger volumes.
Ayache said the strong festive season, along with growth in their route network and fleet, had meant it could grow its team and create jobs.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many airlines collapsed as travel was constrained amid national lockdowns that devastated the sector.
“Lift is always keeping an eye on growth opportunities, but are very responsible in how we approach that, as a sustainable build of the industry is crucial. The domestic market has still only recovered to roughly 75% of pre-Covid passenger volumes as compared with 2019,” Ayache said.
However, it was a tough operating environment with a constrained macro environment, high inflation and low economic growth, as well as infrastructural deficiencies and the knock-on effects of load shedding.
“The biggest challenge we’ve faced as an industry is the cost of jet fuel, which is one of our largest operational expenses and almost three times higher than what it was in December 2020, when Lift launched. Rand weakness is also a challenge. Three of our largest operational costs are denominated or driven by the rand-to-dollar exchange rate, fuel, aircraft leases and insurance,” he said.
Tourism is the lifeblood of aviation.
In 2021, the South African tourism sector contributed 3.7% to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), down from roughly 8% of GDP pre-Covid.
“Today tourism employs around 740 000 people directly and 1.5 million indirectly. The potential is even more evident when you consider that pre-Covid, South African had only about 10m international tourists each year. [This is a] fraction of the between 80m to 90m tourists countries like Spain and France attract. These countries also directly employ almost four times as many people in the travel and tourism sector as we do,” Ayache said.
While the recovery of the airline industry was underway, it was not there yet, and the global consensus was it would not see a full recovery until the end of this year.
“A responsible approach to recovery and adding seat capacity is crucial from all airlines to avoid a repeat of what we have seen the past 25 months, where four airline brands shut their doors,” Ayache said.
Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA) chief executive Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa said in an interview: “We still have a bit of airlift shortage from the domestic aspect. If we are to say we need more international airlines coming in, we need to increase capacity for domestic to transport the travellers coming in to avoid bottlenecks.
“Domestically we need to continuously improve by getting more airline capacity. We need to increase our marketing efforts internationally to encourage international airlines to introduce more routes into South Africa. We know that the China and India markets are important so we need to work on improved connectivity with South Africa,” he added.
BUSINESS REPORT